Museums throughout Aotearoa
New Zealand feature displays of enormous articulated
skeletons and giant eggs. The eggs are bigger than two hands
put together. This is all that remains of the
moa.

Tracing extinctions that happened centuries
ago is difficult, but our collaborative
analysis of ancestral sayings, or whakataukī,
found that early Māori paid attention to their local fauna
and environment and recognised the extinction of these
giant, flightless birds that were an important food
resource.

After Europeans arrived, some
whakataukī used moa as a metaphor for the feared
extinction of the indigenous Māori people themselves, which
emphasises the powerful cultural impact the extinction of
moa had.

Moa were
an important food source for early Māori.Kane Fleury /
Otago Museum, CC
BY-ND

To go the way of the moa

Moa once
walked the uplands and forests of Aotearoa New Zealand,
before they were hunted
to extinction some 500 years ago. Although moa belong to
a time long gone, their story still packs a powerful punch.
Especially as we attempt to save the many threatened species
at risk of disappearing in our own
time.

Although we know when moa
disappeared, and why, we know far less about how people
alive then responded to the giant birds’ extinction. The
loss of the world’s big animals – megafauna including
mammoths, cave bears, giant kangaroos – is a
repeating theme. These extinctions mostly happened so
long ago that we can no longer flesh out the relationships
humans had with these species, except in bare bones
terms.

But New Zealand was one of the last places
on earth that people settled (around AD 1280), and
Māori oral traditions retain clues about the species these
early settlers discovered, and the ecological relationships
they forged.

E koekoe te tūī, e
ketekete te kākā, e kūkū te
kererū

The tui chatters, the
parrot gabbles, the wood pigeon coos

It takes
all kinds to study the past. Our team includes a
conservation biologist, a linguist, a bioinformaticist and
experts in Māori culture. Together, we delved into the
wealth of ecological knowledge embedded in Māori oral
traditions. We unpicked language cues, historical events and
cultural contexts to understand habitats, animals,
landscapes and the relationships between them.

Many whakataukī (pithy sayings like
English proverbs) reveal intimate observations about nature.
The link between flowering times and animal activity expose
seasonal cycles. Whakataukī note the abundance of
food resources.

Of those that refer to birds, a
disproportionate number talk about moa. What they looked
like. How they trampled through the forest with their heads
in the air. How best to eat them.

Moa once
walked the uplands and forests of Aotearoa New Zealand,
before they were hunted to extinction.Kane Fleury /
Otago Museum, CC
BY-ND

He koromiko te wahie i taona ai
te moa

The moa was cooked with the
wood of the koromiko

Oral traditions can be
highly practical. Māori whakataukī are no
exception. Many refer to large birds that made excellent
meals, from tītī (muttonbirds) to shags. This tallies with
the abundance of bones from large bird species that are
found in the rubbish dumps of New Zealand archaeological
sites.

But whakataukī tell us more.
Sometimes, what is missing from a body of knowledge reveals
more than what is actually there. We searched the
whakataukī for bird species that became extinct in
the first few centuries after Māori arrived in New Zealand.
There were none, apart from moa, and the giant eagle, or
pouakai, that preyed on moa. Pouakai tracked moa on the
highway to extinction.

The
fossil bones of this South Island adzebill were found at
Pyramid Valley, North Canterbury.Auckland
Museum - Wikimedia Commons, CC
BY

We know that many large bird species existed
at this time – giant adzebills, a large goose, the New
Zealand raven. But their Māori names are lost. Extinction
is reflected in the whakataukī, but sometimes in
the gaps.

Kua ngaro i te ngaro o te
moa

Lost as the moa was
lost

Losing the names of birds that died out
centuries ago illustrates one powerful connection between
language, culture and biodiversity. When a species goes
extinct, the words and knowledge associated with that
species start to disappear from the world, too. This
extinction pattern is particularly acute in oral cultures.

In contrast, we still recall the birds that went
extinct after European arrival – huia, piopio, koreke (the
New Zealand quail), whekau (the laughing owl). The changes
wreaked on our environment over the last two centuries
remain abundantly clear.

Many whakataukī
highlight the disappearance of the moa, a sign that moa
represented more than just another extinction. They were a
poster species. A hashtag. Many sayings lament the loss of
the moa, using different words and different phrasing, but
with an echo that repeats over and over.

Many
sayings lament the loss of the moa.Kane Fleury /
Otago Museum

Huna i te huna a te
moa

Hidden as the moa
hid

Māori recalled the moa after Europeans
arrived, too. Māori were suffering badly from diseases and
deprivation in the late 1800s. It was as though the Māori
world was being felled along with the forests. There was a
very real fear among both Māori and Europeans that Māori
people and culture would also disappear, just like the
moa.

Ka ngaro ā-moa te iwi
nei

The people will disappear like
the moa

Thankfully, of course, the Māori
world is growing. Its whakataukī speak of ecology
and history, but more than this, they highlight timeless
issues, as relevant today as when they were written, framed
as observations of the natural world. A recurrent underlying
reminder is that our own future is directly interconnected
with our environment. Let’s listen to the lessons in
whakataukī, so we can create an enduring legacy
for the future.

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